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The death of Freddie Gray, a young Black man, while in police custody on April 19 sent residents of Baltimore, Maryland into the streets. Many have been actively calling for justice to be carried out, for the police officers responsible to be held…

So I guess it’s basketball season. For me, basketball is tied up with gender equity debates. I remember that what little discussion over gender equity took place at my high school largely centered around the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams.

In two previous posts, I examined the New York Times’ (NYT) use of racial labels for African Americans and Latin@s (Latinos or Latinas) using NYT Labs’ tool, Chronicle. I found that the NYT has changed the labels they’ve used for these groups over…

In a previous post, I examined the New York Times’ (NYT) use of racial labels for African Americans using NYT Labs’ tool Chronicle. In this post, I expand on that work and look at another racial minority in the US: Latin@s. Latin@s is…

Perhaps my least favorite thing about internet journalism is its ability to endlessly generate non-news by summarizing and linking to what people write on social media sites like reddit and Twitter. This past week, a friend pointed me toward one of these…

The word negro makes me uncomfortable. I never hear it, but I occasionally read it. There’s a pretty famous book by sociolinguist Walt Wolfram (Professor of English, North Carolina State University) called A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech published in 1969. Every time…

When Beyoncé celebrated the word feminist on Sunday night, she was working against a history of celebrities and others rejecting the label feminist. Why do so many women, famous or not, reject the term, while seeming to support the basic…